Helsinki-based startup Valo Therapeutics, pioneering adaptable immunotherapies for cancer and infectious diseases, has secured a substantial funding injection of €2.23 million from the European Innovation Council to advance its cutting-edge PeptiCHIP technology. The innovative diagnostic platform has the potential to revolutionize the identification of a tumor’s antigen presentation profile, which would help to drive the development of bespoke immunotherapies for patients. The fully-funded project, known as “Pre-clinical validation and demonstration of PeptiCHIP” comes with a 100% non-dilutive grant, and Valo Tx will also receive business acceleration support from EIC, which includes mentoring, coaching, and other partnering events.
Valo Therapeutics is an immunotherapy company in Helsinki that is developing antigen-coated oncolytic viruses and vaccine vectors as therapeutic vaccines against cancer and infectious disease, with a lead platform PeptiCRAd-1 made up of virus VALO-D102 coated with MAGE-A3 and NY-ESO-1 peptides, and also developing PeptiCHIP, PeptiENV, and PeptiVAX, among other neoantigen strategies, to drive development of personalized immunotherapies.
Dr Otto Kari, VP & Head of Valo Tx’s Antigen Business Unit, and EIC projects lead, said, “This is a great endorsement from a major European Institution of the potential of our novel microchip based PeptiCHIP technology to transform lives. Each little chip has 14,000 microscopic pillars, with each one able to capture peptides from tiny amounts of tumor tissue for subsequent analysis. EIC Transition grants fund innovation activities that go far beyond the experimental proof of principle in the laboratory to support both progression towards a real-world application, and the innovation’s future commercialization.”
Paul Higham, CEO of Valo Tx, commented, “I’m delighted that the EIC has chosen to support us as we develop PeptiCHIP alongside our clinical development program. Identification of relevant antigens is one of the key challenges in developing effective immunotherapies for cancer. PeptiCHIP will allow us to do exactly this in for our own clinical development and for partnerships with other innovative companies. The unique adaptability and flexibility our lead platform PeptiCRAd provides, coupled with our own antigen identification by PeptiCHIP, will allow us to develop economically viable and real-world practical personalized cancer immunotherapy.
Tumor neoantigens are expressed uniquely by cancer cells and can trigger an efficient immune response against the tumor. Currently the methods available to identify these antigens have significant limitations by being long, complicated and resource demanding.
PeptiCHIP, an IP acquisition from the University of Helsinki, is an innovative microfluidic immune-purification device, coupled with a peptide prioritization algorithm, that can increase the chance of success of the immunotherapy by identifying the most relevant neoantigens to stimulate the immune system. It can be adapted and used in standard biopsy clinical workflows to identify antigens related to any disease. PeptiCHIP, and the insights it delivers about immune response mechanisms, has multiple applications, from research into new therapy development, through to use in the clinic in producing therapies tailored for each patient’s tumor to improve the chances of an effective immune response against and control of the tumor.
